Statue of Abraham Lincoln

Library Park near the intersection of Library and Farmer streets in downtown Detroit

The absence of roads severely limited vehicle
sales in the early years of the Twentieth Century. The owners of the some
of the largest automotive
firms hoped to pressure government agencies into road building. It was particularly
important to get the federal government into road building since states were
inclined to build roads that only served the needs of their own large cities
and their own residents. States seldom had incentives to build roads directly
linked to those of competitive states. By 1911, Henry Joy—president
of Detroit’s prosperous Packard Motor
Car Company—headed an organization
called the Lincoln Highway Association—a group promoting a national
system of highways.

In 1913, Carl Fisher of Salem, Ohio proposed
a Lincoln Highway that would span the nation from Atlantic to Pacific,
thereby linking the
nation together
in a manner similar to what had been accomplished by the transcontinental
railroads. Fisher’s highly succesful Indiana firm made auto parts, but he was not related to
the Fisher brothers who produced auto bodies for GM. Carl Fisher decided
that a good strategy was to promote a Lincoln Highway that would extend
from New York to San Francisco. To bring attention to this project, Carl
Fisher
had his friend, William Mullins, cast statues of the Great Emancipator to
be placed in key locations such as Detroit and along the route of the
highway.
At least six copies of a statue of Abraham Lincoln that had been sculpted
by Alfonso Pelzer in 1895 were produced. Two of those six copies were given
to Detroit automobile entrepreneurs: one to Henry Joy of Packard Motors in
1915 and the other to Henry Leland, founder of the Lincoln
Motor Car Company in 1919. Carl Fisher, who developed and owned the Indianapolis Speedway, saw Abraham Lincoln as an important hero. He wanted a national commemoration of the accomplishments of the Great Emancipator. His Atlantic-to-Pacific Lincoln Highway was compeleted well before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington was completed.

The statue that you see—or its predecessor—stood
from 1919 to 1958 on the grounds of the huge Lincoln plant at Warren and
Livernois
on Detroit’s West Side. When the Ford Motor Company ceased building
Lincolns in that massive factory, Leland’s heirs gave the statue of
President Lincoln to the city of Detroit. It was installed in its present
location, perhaps because this downtown Skilman Branch of the Detroit
Public Library housed the nation’s most extensive archives of publications about the
auto industry. In 1969, the impressive statue was destroyed by vandals. In
the 1980s Neal Shine, a writer for the Detroit Free Press, initiated a drive
to collect funds from Detroit school children to restore the statue to its
original glory. This was done but, in the early 1990s, vandals once again
destroyed the statue. After the Skillman
Foundation restored the downtown
branch of the Detroit Public Library to its original glory, another Detroit
foundation—the $13 million Oliver Dewey Marcks Foundation—paid
to restore the statue of President Lincoln. This is, I believe, a replica
to Pelzer’s original work rather than a reassembling of the pieces
of the vandalized one that had been cast in Salem, Ohio in 1919.

German sculptor, Alfonso Pelzer, came to the
United States in the 1890s and worked in this nation for about a decade.
In 1895, the
city of Lincoln,
New Jersey commissioned him to design a statue of President Lincoln. Fifteen
presidents before Abraham Lincoln might have addressed the issue of slavery,
but none of them took bold steps to end human bondage in this nation dedicated
to freedom and founded on the principle that all men were created equal.
On September 22, 1862 President Lincoln rejected the suggestions of most
of his advisors and declared that as of January 1, 1863, slavery would cease
to exist in all areas of the Confederate States occupied by Union Armies.
Although the scope of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation seems limited,
its consequence were not and, for all practical purposes, the selling of
slaves and the holding of persons in bondage ended with President Lincoln’s
September, 1862 proclamation. Pelzer’s statue shows President Lincoln
holding a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The simple inscription
on this dramatic statue summarizes President Lincoln’s accomplishment
in four words: Let Men be Free.

Carl Fisher played an important role in the
development of the nation’s
vehicle industry. He fully realized the need for publicity, as well as the
need for roads. Between 1913 and 1915, a stone road was completed across
the country. Some funds for this were provided by Fisher himself, by Henry
Joy of Packard and by Frank Sieberling, president of the Goodyear Rubber
Company. You can still travel on the Lincoln Highway route from New York
to San Francisco. From Philadelphia to central Wyoming, Fisher’s Lincoln
Highway is now U. S. Route 30. To promote the auto industry, Fisher purchased
an Indianapolis race track, modernized and expanded it, thereby creating
the nation’s premier race, one that would demonstrate the durability
and speed of cars. Fisher was also the key developer of Miami Beach, Florida.
Indeed, Lincoln and Fisher are still the two most important streets in that
retirement and resort town.